Tough Love: Watching Football On TV While Sitting In The Snow

At first glance, it's just a photo of Big Blue fans watching the 1962 NFL title game while seated outside a Connecticut motel, beyond the range of the New York City-area TV blackout. (Green Bay beat the Giants that day at the old Yankee Stadium, 16-7.)

But take a closer look. What compels this seemingly well-off couple to endure sub-freezing cold alongside what might be the ugliest stretch of the Merritt Parkway? (Wait. Are they a couple? The bespectacled fellow's chair is pulled closer to the TV than the woman's. Is she his wife? Mistress? A random motel guest who just happens to be clutching an inquisitive dachshund?)

[See more photos of people watching TV. They're excellent.]

With a little imagination, the scene assumes an unchaste tension that has little to do with the gridiron. No one in his right mind wants to return to the days when, on any given Sunday, a football fan could only watch one game at a time (if that!) on the tube. And yet . . . isn't there something slightly appealing — something wonderfully, sleazily romantic — about the notion of driving to a discreet little motel; setting up director's chairs on some inexpertly shoveled asphalt; lugging the old black & white outside; and watching a game beneath a forbidding, overcast sky before retiring to a warm bed with over-starched sheets and the requisite rickety headboard, the adamant knocking of which will keep the grinning neighbors up deep into the night?

You bet there is.

Ben Cosgrove is the editor of LIFE.com. Picture This is his weekly (and occasionally more frequent) feature for The Stacks.

Photo Credit: John Loengard—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images